September 2017

For the snark was a boojum, you see.

Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

August 2017

When [Woody Guthrie] wrote his political songs it was
always about lifting people up and giving them hope
and making them feel a better life was possible. He
said he hated songs that made people feel like they
were born to lose. So what I learned from that
— it’s something I’ve been feeling
for a while, but I haven’t been able to
articulate, and that is the biggest enemy of all of us
who want to make the world a better place is not
capitalism or conservatism. It’s actually
cynicism. And not the cynicism of right-wing
newspapers or news channels — the cynicism that
is our greatest enemy is our own cynicism, our own
sense that nothing will ever change, that nobody cares
about this stuff, that all politicians are the same.
If we’re gonna make a difference, we have to be
able to overcome that. We have to be able to identify
our cynicism — we all feel it, of course we all
feel it — and we have to be able to curb it and
put it to one side and go out every day and think the
glass is half-full.

July 2017

June 2017

EduNews has learned that a new form of digital manipulation was
used on the netcast of the … speech. … The
discrepancies are primarily enhancements to Ms. Boyer's voice
intonation, facial expressions, and body language. Viewers who
watched the original version rate Ms. Boyer's performance as
good, while those who watched the edited version rate her
performance as excellent, describing her as extraordinarily
dynamic and persuasive. Based on their analysis, SemioTech
Warriors believe Wyatt/Hayes have developed new software capable
of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the
emotional response evoked in viewers. This dramatically
increases the effectiveness of recorded presentations,
especially when viewed through spex, and its use in the PEN
netcast is likely what caused many supporters of the
calliagnosia initiative to change their votes.

May 2017

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone,
sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products
of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see
fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon
his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the
same means adventure his wealth in the natural
resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the
world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in
their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could
decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the
good faith of the townspeople of any substantial
municipality in any continent that fancy or
information might recommend. He could secure
forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable
means of transit to any country or climate without
passport or other formality, could despatch his
servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such
supply of the precious metals as might seem
convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign
quarters, without knowledge of their religion,
language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his
person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved
and much surprised at the least interference. But,
most important of all, he regarded this state of
affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in
the direction of further improvement, and any
deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and
avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and
imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of
monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to
play the serpent to this paradise, were little more
than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and
appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the
ordinary course of social and economic life, the
internationalization of which was nearly complete in
practice.

April 2017

The most striking difference between ancient and
modern sophists is the ancients were satisfied with a
passing victory of the argument at the expense of
truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory
at the expense of reality.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

March 2017

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes
and ears. It was their final, most essential
command.

— George Orwell, 1984

February 2017

Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism
provides a helpful guide for interpreting the language of fascists.
She noted how decent liberals of 1930s Germany would fact check
the Nazis’ bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be
factual. What they failed to understand, Arendt suggests, is that the
Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of
intent. So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany’s
defeat in WW1, naïve people would counter by saying there’s
no evidence of that. What the Nazis were doing was not describing
what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they
planned to do next. Did 3 million illegals cast votes in this
election? Clearly not. But fact checking is just a way of playing
along with their game. What Trump is saying is not that 3m illegals
voted. What he’s saying is: I’m going to steal the voting
rights of millions of Americans.

January 2017

Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it’s
appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a
problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that
hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That’s
when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers.
Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks—call it
the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex—and in our natural
environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with
one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional
makeup and retouching, and you’re no longer looking at beauty in
its natural form. You’ve got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the
cocaine of good looks.

December 2016

Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in
the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of
simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but
neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context,
neither more or less valid than the other. It’s like that
famous optical illusion … There is no correct
interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see
both at the same time.

Similarly, knowledge of the future is incompatible with free
will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of
choice also made it impossible for me to know the future.
Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act
contrary to that future, including telling others what I know:
those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who
have read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

November 2016

In conclusion: I expect Ms. Clinton to be elected and
I'm currently taking no action to protect myself
against the risks of a Trump presidency. The risks
are real, but I think the odds of Trump winning are
very low. If the unimaginable happens, I'll be
writing about when to head to the bunker.

October 2016

This lost country composers do not actually remember,
but each of them remains all his life somehow attuned
to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs
of his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst
for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back
upon it, and it is only when he despises it that he
finds it when he utters, whatever the subject with
which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony
of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical
in itself—proves the permanence of the elements that
compose his soul. But is it not the fact then that
from those elements, all the real residuum which we
are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be
transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by
master to disciple, by lover to mistress, that
ineffable something which makes a difference in
quality between what each of us has felt and what he
is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the
phrases in which he can communicate with his fellows
only by limiting himself to external points common to
us all and of no interest, art, the art of a Vinteuil
like that of an Elstir, makes the man himself
apparent, rendering externally visible in the colours
of the spectrum that intimate composition of those
worlds which we call individual persons and which,
without the aid of art, we should never know? A pair
of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would
enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way
help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the
same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as
the things of the earth everything that we should be
capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery,
the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to
visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to
behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a
hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that
each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this
we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with
men like these we do really fly from star to star.

September 2016

Extremism is the universal tuberculosis of modern
society: a world infection of resentment and hatred
generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old
values. In the stabler nations the tubercles are
sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless
lunatic movements. In times of social disorder,
depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break
forth and infect the nation. This has happened in
Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United
States.

Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

August 2016

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant
springs; when he first appears above ground he is a
protector.

July 2016

The progress of science in furnishing the Government
with means of espionage is not likely to stop with
wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which
the Government, without removing papers from secret
drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it
will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate
occurrences of the home.

June 2016

There is a widespread belief that the existing
unemployment is the result, in large part, of the
gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and
income which giant corporations have fostered; that by
the control which the few have exerted through giant
corporations, individual initiative and effort are
being paralyzed, creative power impaired and human
happiness lessened; that the true prosperity of our
past came not from big business, but through the
courage, the energy and the resourcefulness of small
men; that only by releasing from corporate control the
faculties of the unknown many, only by reopening to
them the opportunities for leadership, can confidence
in our future be restored and the existing misery be
overcome; and that only through participation by the
many in the responsibilities and determinations of
business, can Americans secure the moral and
intellectual development which is essential to the
maintenance of liberty. If the citizens of Florida
share that belief, I know of nothing in the Federal
Constitution which precludes the State from
endeavoring to give it effect and prevent domination
in intrastate commerce by subjecting corporate chains
to discriminatory license fees. To that extent, the
citizens of each State are still masters of their
destiny.

May 2016

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable — but
then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be
resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change
often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

April 2016

There may be others of my complexion who learn better
by counterexample than by example, by eschewing not
pursuing. That was the sort of instruction which the
Elder Cato was thinking of when he said that the wise
have more to learn from the fools than do the fools
from the wise, as also that lyre-player in antiquity
who, Pausanias says, used to require his students to
go and listen to some performer who lived across the
street so that they would learn to loathe discords and
faulty rhythms. My horror of cruelty thrusts me
deeper into clemency than any example clemency ever
could draw me. A good equerry does not make me sit up
straight in the saddle as much as the sight of a
lawyer or a Venetian out riding, and bad use of
language corrects my own better than a good one.
Every day I am warned and counselled by the stupid
deportment of someone. What hits you affects you and
wakes you up more than what pleases you.

March 2016

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and
learned philosophers of the elder world, the first
observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers
of maddening ether and invisible planets, the
inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells,
should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has
America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice
which spoke herself into existence as a nation,
proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of
human nature, and the only lawful foundations of
government. America, in the assembly of nations,
since her admission among them, has invariably, though
often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of
honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous
reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to
heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of
equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century,
without a single exception, respected the independence
of other nations while asserting and maintaining her
own.

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of
others, even when conflict has been for principles to
which she clings, as to the last vital drop that
visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all
the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will
be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has
been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her
benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to
destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence
of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance
of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her
example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under
other banners than her own, were they even the banners
of foreign independence, she would involve herself
beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of
interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy,
and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the
standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly
change from liberty to force. …

She might become the dictatress of the world. She
would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
…

[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her
march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a
shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom,
Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration:
this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse
with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

February 2016

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived
from nature, proceed from custom; every one, having an
inward veneration for the opinions and manners
approved and received amongst his own people, cannot,
without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor
apply himself to them without applause.

January 2016

You seem to have misapprehended my proposition for the
choice of a Senate. I had two things in view: to get
the wisest men chosen, & to make them perfectly
independent when chosen. I have ever observed that a
choice by the people themselves is not generally
distinguished for its wisdom. This first secretion
from them is usually crude & heterogeneous. But
give to those so chosen by the people a second choice
themselves, & they generally will chuse wise men.
For this reason it was that I proposed the
representatives (& not the people) should chuse
the Senate, & thought I had notwithstanding that
made the Senators (when chosen) perfectly independant
of their electors. However I should have no objection
to the mode of election proposed in the printed plan
of your committee, to wit, that the people of each
county should chuse twelve electors, who should meet
those of the other counties in the same district &
chuse a senator. I should prefer this too for another
reason, that the upper as well as lower house should
have an opportunity of superintending & judging of
the situation of the whole state & be not all of
one neighborhood as our upper house used to be. So
much for the wisdom of the Senate. To make them
independent, I had proposed that they should hold
their places for nine years, & then go out (one
third every three years) & be incapable for ever
of being re-elected to that house. My idea was that
if they might be re-elected, they would be casting
their eye forward to the period of election (however
distant) & be currying favor with the electors,
& consequently dependant on them. My reason for
fixing them in office for a term of years rather than
for life, was that they might have in idea that they
were at a certain period to return into the mass of
the people & become the governed instead of the
governor which might still keep alive that regard to
the public good that otherwise they might perhaps be
induced by their independance to forget. Yet I could
submit, tho' not so willingly to an appointment for
life, or to any thing rather than a mere creation by
& dependance on the people. I think the present
mode of election objectionable because the larger
county will be able to send & will always send a
man (less fit perhaps) of their own county to the
exclusion of a fitter who may chance to live in a
smaller county. — I wish experience may
contradict my fears. — That the Senate as well
as lower [or shall I speak truth & call it upper]
house should hold no office of profit I am clear; but
not that they should of necessity possess
distinguished property. You have lived longer than I
have and perhaps may have formed a different judgment
on better grounds; but my observations do not enable
me to say I think integrity the characteristic of
wealth. In general I beleive the decisions of the
people, in a body, will be more honest & more
disinterested than those of wealthy men: & I can
never doubt an attachment to his country in any man
who has his family & peculium in it: — Now
as to the representative house which ought to be so
constructed as to answer that character truly. I was
for extending the right of suffrage (or in other words
the rights of a citizen) to all who had a permanent
intention of living in the country. Take what
circumstances you please as evidence of this, either
the having resided a certain time, or having a family,
or having property, any or all of them. Whoever
intends to live in a country must wish that country
well, & has a natural right of assisting in the
preservation of it. I think you cannot distinguish
between such a person residing in the country &
having no fixed property, & one residing in a
township whom you say you would admit to a vote.
— The other point of equal representation I
think capital & fundamental.

December 2015

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations;
cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and
morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good
policy does not equally enjoin it - It will be worthy
of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a
great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and
too novel example of a people always guided by an
exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that,
in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a
plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which
might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be
that Providence has not connected the permanent
felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment,
at least, is recommended by every sentiment which
ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible
by its vices?

⋮

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I
conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the
jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly
awake, since history and experience prove that foreign
influence is one of the most baneful foes of
republican government. But that jealousy to be useful
must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of
the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense
against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign
nation and excessive dislike of another cause those
whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and
serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on
the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues
of the favorite are liable to become suspected and
odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause
and confidence of the people, to surrender their
interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign
nations is in extending our commercial relations, to
have with them as little political connection as
possible. So far as we have already formed
engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good
faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary
interests which to us have none; or a very remote
relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent
controversies, the causes of which are essentially
foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be
unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties
in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the
ordinary combinations and collisions of her
friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables
us to pursue a different course. If we remain one
people under an efficient government. the period is
not far off when we may defy material injury from
external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude
as will cause the neutrality we may at any time
resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when
belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making
acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the
giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or
war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall
counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?
Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by
interweaving our destiny with that of any part of
Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils
of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or
caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent
alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so
far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for
let me not be understood as capable of patronizing
infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim
no less applicable to public than to private affairs,
that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it,
therefore, let those engagements be observed in their
genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary
and would be unwise to extend them.

November 2015

I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned
in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar
pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them,
living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest.
His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the
human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he
stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them
without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself;
if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be
said to have lost his country.

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which
alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and
watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous,
ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a
fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aims were to prepare men
for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual
childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided
they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their
happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it.
It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their
needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal
concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates,
divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove them entirely
from the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1831

October 2015

In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and
intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages
it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to
intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The
most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really
free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

September 2015

I shall never again enjoy the opportunity of speaking my
thoughts to an audience such as this, and on so privileged an
occasion a lecturer may well be tempted to bethink himself
whether he knows of any neglected truth, any cardinal
proposition, that might server as his selected epigraph, as a
last signal, perhaps even as a target. I am not thinking of
those shining precepts which are the registered property of
every school; that is to say — Learn as much by writing as
by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights
from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart;
guard against the prestige of great names; see that your
judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no
trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to
actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause of the
weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an
idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best
and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and
study problems in preference to periods; …. Most of this,
I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the
weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to
debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude,
but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own
lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying
penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The
plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is
perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which to to
excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the
just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to
baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history
what it has become. They set up the principle that only a
foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of
the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the
ideas of the present.

July 2015

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and
deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be
touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom
more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond
amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored
with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the
present, but without the experience of the present; and forty
years of experience in government is worth a century of
book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to
rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent
and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate
imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once
known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical
means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that
laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of
the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more
enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed,
and manners and opinions change with the change of
circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace
with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still
the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to
remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It
is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in
blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the
gradual change of circumstances, of favoring progressive
accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old
abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged
their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and
ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the
peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would
have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow
no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not
as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering
its own affairs.

June 2015

May 2015

The Republican Party has become a radical insurgency —
ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and
dismissive of the legitimacy of its political
opposition. Securing the common good in the face of these
developments will require structural changes but also an
informed and strategically focused citizenry.

April 2015

March 2015

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols,
and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the
fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human
history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present
day. It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human
urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with
us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some
pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different
message—that it can be ended. That all these problems can
be over, if only we listen, and follow.

February 2015

… I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and
King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they
did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way
against holders of power, increasing as the power increases.
Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal
responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even
when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when
you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by
authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office
sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the
negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and
keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.
You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what
one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder
Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a
clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater
crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious
reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of
quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of
historical science.

January 2015

PART I
Article 1
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any
act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is
intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or
a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a
third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or
intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on
discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at
the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or
other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or
suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or
national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider
application.
Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative,
judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under
its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a
threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency,
may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be
invoked as a justification of torture.
⋮
Article 5
1. Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to
establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the
following cases:
(a) When the offences are committed in any territory under its
jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
(b) When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
(c) When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers
it appropriate.
⋮
Article 16
1. Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under
its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1, when such
acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official
capacity. In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and
13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture of references
to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

December 2014

If our handling of the problem of Communist influence in our
midst is not carefully moderated—if we permit it, that is,
to become an emotional preoccupation and to blind us to the more
important positive tasks before us—we can do a damage to
our national purpose beyond comparison greater than anything
that threatens us today from the Communist side. The American
Communist party is today, by and large, an external danger. It
represents a tiny minority in our country; it has no real
contact with the feelings of the mass of our people; and its
position as the agency of a hostile foreign power is clearly
recognized by the overwhelming mass of our citizens.

But the subjective emotional stresses and temptations to which
we are exposed in our attempt to deal with this domestic problem
are not an external danger: they represent a danger within
ourselves—a danger that something may occur in our own
minds and souls which will make us no longer like the persons by
whose efforts this republic was founded and held together, but
rather like the representatives of that very power we are trying
to combat: intolerant, secretive, suspicious, cruel and
terrified of internal dissension because we have lost our own
belief in ourselves and in the power of our ideals. The worst
thing that our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most
to fear from their activities, is that we should become like
them.

George F. Kennan, Where Do You Stand on Communism?, New York Times Magazine, May 27, 1951

November 2014

This was what they had raised from the scraps of communism.
This was what the struggle for freedom and democracy had
delivered. Bread and circuses. Mostly circuses. From one
grand deception to another was their lot. First the Soviet
sham, then the capitalist. For the ordinary citizen, these were
just two different varieties of poison. The current variety
served in a nicer bottle.

October 2014

George Orwell introduced the dictator Big Brother in his novel
1984, as I’m sure you know. The book was an
allegorical treatment of Stalinism, of course. And ever since
then, the term ‘Big Brother’ has functioned as a
social icon. That was Orwell’s great accomplishment. But
now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and
all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now,
we’d point to him and say, ‘Watch out! He’s
Big Brother!’ There’s no longer any place for Big
Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called
Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal
contrast, don’t you think?

September 2014

In a lot of ways, we’re worse off today than we were under
George W. Bush.

Back then, Bush’s extremist assault on civil liberties,
human rights and other core American values in the name of
fighting terror felt like an aberration.

The expectation was that those policies would be quickly
reversed, discredited — and explicitly outlawed —
once he was no longer in power.

Instead, under President Barack Obama, they’ve become
institutionalized.

There will be no snapping back to a pre-Bush-era respect for
basic human dignity and civil rights. Thanks to Obama,
it’s going to be a hard, long fight.

In some cases, Obama has set even darker precedents than his
predecessor. Massively invasive bulk surveillance of Americans
and others has been expanded, not constrained. This president
secretly condemns people to death without any checks or
balances, and shrugs as his errant drones massacre innocent
civilians. Whistleblowers and journalists who expose national
security wrongdoing face unprecedented criminal prosecution.

August 2014

A comfortably plump dog happened to run into a wolf. The wolf
asked the dog where he had been finding enough food to get so
big and fat. It is a man, said the dog, who gives me
all this food to eat. The wolf then asked him, And what
about that bare spot there on your neck? The dog replied,
My skin has been rubbed bare by the iron collar which my
master forged and placed upon my neck. The wolf then jeered
at the dog and said, Keep your luxury to yourself then! I
don’t want anything to do with it, if my neck will have to
chafe against a chain of iron!

July 2014

Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to
execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of
the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to
promote the general welfare they have become the tools of
corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their
selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits
enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and
acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this
invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between
corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the
statesmanship of the day.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., The Progressive Covenant With The People speech (August 1912).

June 2014

To be exact, our economic leadership does not seem to be aware
that the normal functioning of our economy leads to be
financial trauma crises, inflation, currency depreciations,
unemployment, and poverty in the midst of what could be
virtually universal affluence—in short, that financially
complex capitalism is inherently flawed.

Economic advisers, whether liberal or conservative, believe in
the fundamental soundness of the economy. … The
truth of the matter is that something is fundamentally wrong
with our economy. As we have shown, a capitalist economy is
inherently flawed because its investment and financing processes
introduce endogenous destabilizing forces. The markets of a
capitalist economy are not well suited to accommodate
specialized, long-lived, expensive capital assets. In fact, the
underlying economic theory of the policy establishment does not
allow for capital assets and financial relations such as exist.

May 2014

If any one owe a debt for a loan, and a storm prostrates the
grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not growth for
lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any
grain, he washes his debt-tablet in water and pays no rent for
this year.

April 2014

How plain that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or
class! Nature does not recognize it; she finds her own again
under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen
to be a law and not an accident. It is as common as
life. … When we look over the fields we are not saddened
because these particular flowers or grasses will wither; for the
law of their death is the law of new life. Will not the land be
in good heart because the crops die down from year to
year? The herbage cheerfully consents to bloom, and wither, and
give place to a new. So it is with the human plant. We are
partial and selfish when we lament the death of the individual,
unless our plaint be a pæan to the departed soul, and a
sigh, as the wind sighs over the fields, which no shrub
interprets into its private grief.

March 2014

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of
reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It’s
completely impossible. (2) It’s possible, but it’s
not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

Arthur C. Clarke

February 2014

As you walk from the terminal toward your airliner, you notice a
man on a ladder busily prying rivets out of its wing. Somewhat
concerned, you saunter over to the rivet popper and ask him just
what the hell he’s doing.

I work for the airline—Growthmania
Intercontinental, the man informs you, and the airline
has discovered that it can sell these rivets for two dollars
apiece.

But how do you know you won’t fatally weaken the wing
doing that? you inquire.

Don’t worry, he assures you. I’m certain
the manufacturer made this plane much stronger than it needs to
be, so no harm’s done. Besides, I’ve taken lots of
rivets from this wing and it hasn’t fallen off yet.
Growthmania Airlines needs the money; if we didn’t pop the
rivets, Growthmania wouldn’t be able to continue
expanding. And I need the commission they pay me—fifty
cents a rivet!

You must be out of your mind!

I told you not to worry; I know what I’m doing. As a
matter of fact, I’m going to fly on this flight also, so
you can see there’s absolutely nothing to be concerned
about.

Any sane person would, of course, go back into the terminal,
report the gibbering idiot and Growthmania Airlines to the FAA,
and make reservations on another carrier. You never
have to fly on an airliner. But unfortunately all of
us are passengers on a very large spacecraft—one on which
we have no option but to fly. And, frighteningly, it is
swarming with rivet poppers behaving in ways analogous that just
described.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Extinction: The Causes and
Consequences of the Disappearance of Species

January 2014

But I’ve loitered long enough. The Lord bless your life
and bestow on you such honor as you surely deserve. And mind
you commend me to your mannerly wife, both to her and the other,
those honorable ladies who kidded me so cleverly with their
cunning tricks. But no wonder if a fool should fall for a
female and be wiped of his wits by womanly
guile—it’s the way of the world. Adam fell for of a
woman, and Solomon for several, and as for Samson, Delilah was
his downfall, and afterwards David was bamboozled by Bathsheba
and bore the grief. All wrecked and ruined by their wrongs; if
only we could love our ladies without believing their lies.

December 2013

A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn’t reject anyone.
He is ready to use all situations
and doesn’t waste anything.
This is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.

Tao Te Ching, translated by S. Mitchell

November 2013

Vercotti: …one night Dinsdale walks with a couple
of big lads, one of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear
missile. They said I bought one of their fruit machines and
would I pay for it?

Interviewer: How much did they want?

Vercotti: Uh, Three quarters of a million pounds, and
they went out.

Interviewer: Why didn’t you call for the police?

Vercotti: Well, I noticed the lad with the
thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area.
Anyway, a week later, they come back and said the cheque had
bounced and that I had to see Doug.

Interviewer: Doug?

Vercotti: Doug. (takes a drink) I was terrified of
him. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men
pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was
frightened of Doug.

Interviewer: What did he do?

Vercotti: He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks:
dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and
satire.

August 2013

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell
lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Karl Kraus

July 2013

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything
in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those
behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We
die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so
nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will
turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.
Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more.
Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have
their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of
Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria,
we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

June 2013

The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will
only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior
and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of
such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going
through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous)
disguises just so that they could purify their own essential
nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex.
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more
fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper
and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is
not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any
bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he
thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb
through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light
when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in
the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do
not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday
(and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe,
trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday
there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the
mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something
that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only
of life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the
outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is
now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and
reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one
human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to
woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with
infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity
in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now
preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that
consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and
greet each other.

May 2013

I’ve thought about modern American politics recently, and
I thought, Why can’t these guys comes to a reasonable
compromise on issues that affect everybody?
Then I realized they don’t want to compromise …
because their primary pleasure in doing this is to generate a
sense of purpose in their lives that might arise out of some
negative emotional attribute such as vengeance, retribution, or
just ventilation of anger. … the Tea Party, for example,
what if that is their purpose to life? Well, that’s quite
different than thinking they’re trying to be reasonable
and rational. Rationality takes second place to the feeling of
whatever gives them real meaning. This is true on all sides; I
don’t mean to single out one group of people.

It’s allowed me to understand that these
mechanisms—these mental sensations— probably drive
the majority of modern discourse; it’s not reason.

…

Most of modern discourse is not about arriving at the best
answer; it’s about arriving at the answer that gives the
individual participants the greatest sense of pleasure and
purpose. That’s quite different. And until you can see
that … we’re sort of stuck.

April 2013

The war tried to kill us in spring. As grass greened the plains
of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung
hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and
through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into windswept
growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its
thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed
onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the
dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation.
It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.

Then, in summer, the war tried to kill us as the heat blanched
all color from the plains. The sun pressed into our skin, and
the war sent its citizens rustling into the shade of white
buildings. It cast a white shade on everything, like veil over
our eyes. It tried to kill us every day, but it had not
succeeded. Not that our safety was preordained. We were not
destined to survive. The fact is, were were not destined at
all. The war would take what it could get. It was patient. It
didn’t care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were
loved by many or not at all. While I slept that summer, the war
came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go
on, only to go on. And I knew the war would have its way.

March 2013

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by
human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for
wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the
gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence
of the weak and the less gifted.

February 2013

But what about the other side [literary intellectuals]? They are
impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are
vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the
traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as
though the natural order did not exist. As though the
exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in
its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific
edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual
depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and
wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most
non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even
if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as
though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a
whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness
doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the
absence of training.

As with the tone-deaf, they don’t know what they miss.
They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have
never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss
them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their
own specialization is just as startling. A good many times I
have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards
of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who
have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity
at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been
provoked and have asked the company how many of them could
describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was
cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is
about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of
Shakespeare’s?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler
question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or
acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying,
Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the
highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same
language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and
the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have
about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would
have had.

Just one more of those quesions, that my non-scientific friends
regard as being in the worst of taste. Cambridge is a
university where scientists and non-scientists meet every night
at dinner. About two years ago, one of the most astonishing
experiments in the whole history of science was brought off. I
don’t mean sputnik—that was admirable for quite
different reasons, as feat of organisation and thriumphant use
of existing knowledge. No I mean the experiment at Columbia by
Yang and Lee. It is an experiment of the greatest beauty and
originality, but the result is so startling that one forgets how
beautiful the experiment is. It makes us think again about some
of the fundamentals of the physical world. Intuition, common
sense—they are neatly stood on their heads. The result is
usually known as the contradiction of parity. If there were any
serious communication between the two cultures, this experiment
would have been talked about at every High Table in Cambridge.
Was it? I wasn’t here: but I should like to ask the
question.

January 2013

I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are
two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum
electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of
fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.

Horace Lamb, 1932 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science

December 2012

To calibrate the unit to your specifications, follow these steps:

Attach the sensors to your fingertips.

Put on the percepto-visual mind-output capture goggles.

Lie back.

Look at the world.

The process takes forty-three to forty-four seconds, depending
on factors such as body mass, natural hair color, and degree of
self-knowledge.

When the calibration is complete, your vehicle will have the
same limits that you do.

You can’t build a car that violates the laws of physics.
Same goes for a time machine. You can’t go anywhere, only
to places it will let you go. You can only go to places that
you will let yourself go.

November 2012

October 2012

The Republican vision is that 20 white male billionaires will
own everything and rule the world with an iron whip. The
Democratic vision is completely different, in that not all the
billionaires will be white men.

September 2012

Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this
process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about
reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about
it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our
understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any
given time.

August 2012

My confidence is unshaken that we are taking all the precautions
which legislation can prudently take against the recurrence of a
monetary crisis. It may occur in spite of our
precautions, and if it does, and if it be necessary to
assume a grave responsibility for the purpose of meeting it, I
dare say men will be found willing to assume such a
responsibility.

I would rather trust to this than impair the efficacy and
probable success of those measures by which one hopes to control
evil tendencies in their beginning, and to diminish the risk
that extraordinary measures may be necessary.

July 2012

Don’t submit to stupid rules
Be yourself and not a fool
Don’t accept average habits
Open your heart and push the limits

Enigma, Push The Limits, from The Screen Behind The Mirror

June 2012

Before [the French revolution], a privileged class that made the
rules — rules favouring itself — overspent on a
foreign war and then tried to stabilise the nation by overtaxing
the already ruinously taxed populace. Confronted with protest,
the aristocrats responded with inflexibility and prevarication,
and dedicated themselves to preserving their own advantages at
the expense of everyone else. If this sounds in any way
familiar, it may be bracing to recall that before long, heads
were being sliced from necks, blood was running in the
streets…

May 2012

A common myth most of us intuitively accept is that there is a
negative correlation between intelligence and belief: as
intelligence goes up belief in superstition or magic goes down.
This, in fact, turns out not to be the case, especially as you
move up the IQ spectrum. In professions in which everyone is
above average in IQ (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and so forth),
there is no relationship between intelligence and success
because at that level other variables come into play that
determine career outcomes (ambition, time allocation, social
skills, networking, luck, and so on). Similarly, when people
encounter claims that they know little about (which is most
claims for most of us), intelligence is usually not a factor in
belief, with one exception: once people commit to a belief, the
smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those
beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because
they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for
nonsmart reasons.

March 2012

To sum up, in five days the New York Times, the
Herald Tribune, the American, the
Evening Journal, the Sun, and the
World-Telegram—all those great molders of public
opinion—have had no opinion on the largest bank scandal
under their noses since the failure of the Bank of United
States. It all recalls that ancient music-hall quip: If you
steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250,000,
you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you’re
a financier.

February 2012

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing
primitive about this language that flowed from people’s
hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless
array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers
and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a
delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less.
Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still,
and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then)
that people were not saying something or other. No distinction
was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of
life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal
was no less an expression than making the sign for I love
you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to
shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise
something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up
what someone had dropped something was being said; and even when
the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something.
Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when
a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual
eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover
might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all
dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you.
These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people
knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go
around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the
things other people said, they were used to interrupting each
other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes
these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave
people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my
nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love
you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time
the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest
form. Just open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

January 2012

I found him just as he was about to drift into a black hole. He
had a face like soft clay, and haunches that were bald in spots
where he’d been chewing off his own fur. I don’t
think anyone has ever been as happy to see anything as this dog
was to see me. He licked my face and that was that. I asked
him what he wanted his name to be. He didn’t say
anything, so I named him Ed.

The smell of Ed is pretty powerful in here, but I’m okay
with that. He’s a good dog, sleeps a lot, sometimes licks
his paw to comfort himself. Doesn’t need food or water.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know that he
doesn’t exist. Ed is just this weird ontological entity
that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection.
Superfluous. Gratuitous. He must violate some sort of
coservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva.
And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a
nonexistant dog.

December 2011

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born
talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no
particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering
contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if
we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we
flesh ourselves out.

The governesses of the monied classes often held that a child
ought to be kept from witnessing cruelty and ugliness, the
better to preserve some ounce of innocence. Rural grannies and
spinster aunts—like the Nanny who had helped raise
Elphaba—neither mollified nor coddled. They believed it
was better for a child to know what befalls a chicken when the
feast of Lurlinemas rolls around. Better to learn—from a
distance—the tricks perpetrated on the weak, the
distractible, the unlucky.

Both pedagogical stances, however, relied on a common
assumption. Growth and change were viewed as a reaction to
conditions met. One might as easily argue, however, that it is
the world’s obligation to respond to children. By force
of personality, by dint of their vicious beauty and untamed
ways, children tromp into the world ready to disfigure it.
Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the
world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of
course, it renews itself—that is the secret. Dying in
order to live, that sort of thing.

November 2011

To be precise, the most important concern in court politics is
access to the mind of the prince. And if economics is too
important to be left to the economists, it is certainly too
important to be left to economist-courtiers.

October 2011

Ok, let me give you some background now. We have come to
believe that growth is the very definition of progress. You
talk to any businessperson or politician and say, How well
did you do last year? And, within a picosecond, they will
talk about growth in the GDP and the economy in profit, jobs or
market share. And, anything in a finite world cannot grow
forever. We live within the biosphere, that cannot
grow—it’s fixed.

And, I use the analogy of the bacteria in the test tube for why
it’s suicidal to look for steady endless growth. Anything
growing exponentially has a predictable doubling time. I give
you a test tube full of food for bacteria—that’s an
analogy with the planet—and I put one bacterial cell in
and it is us. It’s going to go into exponential growth
and divide every minute. So, at time zero, at the beginning,
there is one bacterium. One minute, there are two. Two
minutes, four. Three minutes, eight. Four minutes,
16. That’s exponential growth.

And at 60 minutes, the test tube is completely packed with
bacteria, and there’s no food left. When is the test tube
only half full? And the answer of course, is at 59 minutes.
So, at 58 minutes it’s 25 percent full, 57 minutes, 12 and
a half percent full. At 55 minutes of the 60-minute cycle,
it’s three percent full. So, if at 55 minutes, one of the
bacteria looks around and says, Hey guys, I’ve been
thinking, we’ve got a population problem. The other
bacteria would say, Jack, what the hell have you been
drinking, man? 97 percent of the test tube is empty, and
we’ve been around for 55 minutes! And, they’d be
five minutes away from filling it.

So, the bacteria are no smarter than humans. At 59 minutes they
go, Oh my god! Jack was right! What the hell are we going to
do, we’ve got one minute left! Well, don’t give any
money to those economists, but why don’t you give it to
those scientists? And, by God, somehow those bacterial
scientists in less than a minute, they invent three tests tubes
full of food for bacteria. Now, that would be like us
discovering three more planet Earths that we could start using
immediately. So, they’re saved, right, they’ve
quadrupled the amount of food in space. So what happens? Well,
at 60 minutes, the first test tube is full. At 61 minutes, the
second is full, and at 62 minutes, all four are full. By
quadrupling the amount of food in space, you buy two extra
minutes. And, how do you add any more air, water, soil or
biodiversity to the biosphere. You can’t, it’s
fixed! And, every scientist I’ve talked to agrees with
me. We’re already past the 59th minute.

September 2011

In all disciplines theory plays a double role: it is both an
lens and a blinder. As a lens, it focuses the mind upon
specific problems, enabling conditional statements to be made
about causal relations for a well-defined but limited set of
phenomena. But as a blinder, theory narrows the field of
vision. Questions that are meaningful in the world are often
nonsense questions within a theory. If such nonsense questions
are often posed by developments in the world, then the
discipline is ripe for a revolution in theory. Such a
revolution, however, requires the development of new instruments
of thought. This is a difficult intellectual process.

August 2011

Unfortunately, the economic theory that is taught in colleges
and graduate schools—the equipment of students and
practitioners of economics over the past thirty years and the
intellectual basis of economic policy in capitalist
democracies—is seriously flawed. The conclusions based on
the models derived from standard theoretical economics cannot be
applied to the formulation of policy for our type of economy.
Established economic theory, especially the highly mathematical
theory largely developed after World War II, can demonstrate
that an abstractly defined exchange mechanism will lead to a
coherent, if not optimum, result. However, this mathematical
result is proven for models that abstract from corporate
boardrooms and Wall Street. The model does not deal with
time, money, uncertainty, financing of ownership of capital
assets, and investment. … In fact, the Wall Streets
of the world are important; they generate destabilizing forces,
and from time to time the financial processes of our economy
lead to serious threats of financial and economic instability,
that is, the behavior of the economy becomes incoherent.

July 2011

The population problem has no technical solution; it
requires a fundamental extension in morality.
…
A technical solution may be defined as one that
requires a change only in the techniques of the
natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the
way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

June 2011

People read their own meanings into situations that are
unclear or provocative of emotion.

It is characteristic of large numbers of people in our
society that they see and think in terms of stereotypes,
personalization, and oversimplifications, that they cannot
recognize or tolerate ambiguous and complex situations, and
that they accordingly respond chiefly to symbols that
oversimplify and distort.

Emotional commitment to a symbol is associated with
contentment and quiescence regarding problems that would
otherwise arouse concern.

An active demand for increased economic resources or
fewer political restrictions on actions is not always
operative. It is, rather, a function of the comparison and
contrast with reference groups, usually those not far
removed in socioeconomic status.

The phenomena discussed above (the supplying of meaning
in vague situations, sterotypes, oversimplification,
political quiescence) are in large measure associated with
social, economic, or cultural factors affecting large
segments of the population. They acquire political meaning
as group phenomena.

May 2011

I’d gladly lose me to find you, I’d gladly give up all I had
To find you I’d suffer anything and be glad
I’d pay any price just to get you, I’d work all my life and I will
To win you I’d stand naked, stoned and stabbed
I’d call that a bargain, the best I ever had/The best I ever had
I’d gladly lose me to find you, I’d gladly give up all I got
To catch you I’m gonna run and never stop
I’d pay any price just to win you, surrender my good life for bad
To find you I’m gonna drown an unsung man
I’d call that a bargain, the best I ever had/The best I ever had
I sit looking ’round, I look at my face in the mirror
I know I’m worth nothing without you
And like one and one don’t make two, one and one make one
And I’m looking for that free ride to me, I’m looking for you.

The Who, Bargain, Who’s Next

April 2011

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way—
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

March 2011

We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
No, no!

Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that’s all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
’Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
No, no!

I’ll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

February 2011

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in
the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The
beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the
forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft,
clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the
Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and
high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

January 2011

It should not be hastily assumed that because a particular set
of controversies passes out of the public mind that the implied
problems were solved in any fundamental sense. Quite often a
solution is a magical solution which changes nothing in the
conditions affecting the tension level of the community, and
which merely permits the community to distract its attention to
another set of equally irrelevant symbols. The number of
statutes which pass the legislature, or the number of decrees
which are handed down by the executive, but which change nothing
in the permanent practices of society, is a rough index of the
role of magic politics.

Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics, 1930

December 2010

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption,
mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth
— not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently
produced — to provide men with buying power equal to the
amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic
machinery.

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction
pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion
of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital
accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands
of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products that would justify a
reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In
consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could
stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out,
the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high
levels of employment in that period with the aid of an
exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system.
This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings
as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the
upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private
debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per
cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took
the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel
structures, consumer installment debt, brokers’ loans, and
foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of
this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain
high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there
been a better distribution of the current income from the
national product — in other words, had there been less
savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income
in the lower groups — we should have had far greater
stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for
instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy
individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the
public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to
the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or
greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of
1929.

The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned
on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their
consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be
applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally
reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what
seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption
when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money
world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and
employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which
further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a
continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear,
requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and
time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of
deflation was closed until one third of the entire working
population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by
fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than
ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and
income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such
as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and
interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required
such a portion of the national income to meet them that the
amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to
support the population.

November 2010

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a
substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
…
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following
not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it
offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and
meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures
the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an
absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and
abuses which made their lives miserable, but by
freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it
does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a
closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

October 2010

I took that opportunity to tell him [Kissinger] something that I
had long thought to tell someone who was about to enter the
world of really high secrecy. And I said, Henry, you are about
to get a lot of clearances higher than top secret that you did
not know existed. That is going to have a sequence of effects
on you. First, a great exileration that you are getting all
this amazing information that you didn’t even know
existed. And the next phase is that you’ll feel like a
fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t
last long. Fairly soon you’ll come to think that everyone
else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he
knew what I knew. So in the end you stop listening to them.

September 2010

[T]he historical record suggests that there is a very clear
connection in the long run between an individual Great
Power’s economic rise and fall and its growth and decline
as an important military power (or world empire). This, too, is
hardly surprising, as it follows from two related facts. The
first is that economic resources are necessary to support a
large-scale military establishment. The second is that, so far
as the international system is concerned, both power and wealth
are always relative and should be seen as such. Three
hundred years ago the mercantilist writer von Hornigk observed
that

whether a nation be today mighty and rich or not depends not
on the abundance or security of its power and riches, but
principally on whether its neighbors possess more or less of
it.

In the chapters that follow this observation will be borne out
time and again. The Netherlands in the mid-eighteenth century
was richer in absolute terms than a hundred years
earlier, but by that stage was much less of a Great Power
because neighbors like France and Britain had more
. . . of it (that is, more power and riches). The
France of 1914 was, absolutely, more powerful than that of
1850—but this was little consolation when France was being
eclipsed by a much stronger Germany. Britain today has far
greater wealth, and its armed forces possess far more powerful
weapons, than in its mid-Victorian prime; that avails it little
when its share of the world product has shrunk from about 25
percents to about 3 percent. If a nation as more
. . . of it, things are fine; if less of
it, there are problems.

This does not mean, however, that a nation’s relative
economic and military power will rise and fall in
parallel. Most of the historical examples covered here
suggest that there is a noticeable lag time between the
trajectory of a state’s relative economic strength and the
trajectory of its military/territorial influence. Once again,
the reason for this is not difficult to grasp. An economically
expanding Power—Britain in the 1860s, the United States in
the 1890s, Japan today—may well prefer to become rich
rather than to spend heavily on armaments. A half-century later,
priorities may well have altered. The earlier economic
expansion has brought with it overseas obligations (dependence
upon foreign markets and raw materials, military alliances,
perhaps bases and colonies). Other, rival Powers are now
economically expanding at a faster rate, and wish in turn to
extend their influence abroad. The world has become a more
competitive place, and market shares are being eroded.
Pessimistic observers talk of decline; patriotic statesmen will
call for renewal.

In these more troubled circumstances, the Great Power is likely
to find itself spending much more on defense than it
did two generations earlier, and yet still discover that the
world is a less secure environment—simply because other
Powers have grown faster, and are becoming stronger. Imperial
Spain spent much more on its army in the troubled 1630s and
1640s than it did in the 1580s, when the Castilian economy was
healthier. Edwardian Britain’s defense expenditures were
far greater in 1910 than they were at, say, the time of
Palmerston’s death in 1865, when the British economy was
relatively at its peak; but which Britons by the later date felt
more secure? The same problem, it will be argued below, appears
to be facing both the United States and the USSR today. Great
Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending
more on security, and thereby divert potential resources
from investment and compound their long-term dilemma.

…

[T]he history of the past five hundred years of international
rivalry demonstrates that military security is never
enough. It may, over the shorter term, deter or defeat rival
states (and that, for most political leaders and their publics,
is perfectly satisfactory). But if, by such victories, the
nation overextends itself geographically and strategically; if,
even at a less imperial level, it chooses to devote a large
proportion of its total income to protection, leaving
less for productive investment, it is likely to find its
economic output slowing down, with dire implications for its
long-term capacity to maintain both its citizens’
consumption demands and its international position. Already
this is happening in the case of the USSR, the United States,
and Britain; …

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, 1987

August 2010

The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more.

Roger Waters, Brain Damage from the album Dark Side of the Moon

July 2010

The second aspect of the ideological challenge to the Soviet
Union was the development and propagation of an American
economic ideology that might counter the promise of
Marxism—what today we call neoclassical economics,
which has gained an intellectual status in American economic
activities and governmental affairs similar to that of
Marxism-Leninism in the former USSR. Needless to say, Soviet
citizens never understood Marxism-Leninism as an ideology until
after it had collapsed, just as Americans like to think (or
pretend) that their economics is a branch of science, not a
fighting doctrine to defend and advance their interests against
those of others. They may consider most economists to be
untrustworthy witch doctors, but they regard the tenets of a
laissez-faire economy—with its cutthroat competition,
casino stock exchange, massive inequalities of wealth, and a
minor, regulatory role for government—as self-evident
truths.
…
Its propositions were now expressed less in words than in
simultaneous equations, the old ideas of Adam Smith reappearing
as fully mathematical axioms, increasingly divorced from
empirical research. Its data were said to be stylized
facts, and ecnomists set out to demonstrate through
deductive reasoning expressed in mathematical formulas that
resources could be allocated efficiently only through an
unfettered market. By now all these terms (resources,efficiency,markets) had been transformed into
abstractions, not unlike the abstract formulations (the
proletariat,the bourgeoisie,class
conflict) of its Soviet opponents. English-speaking
economics became such a hard science that in 1969 the
central bank of Sweden started giving Nobel Prizes to its
adepts, virtually all of them American academicians. This
ensured that virtually all aspiring economists would in the
future try to do so-called theoretical economics—that is
the algebraic modeling of markets—rather than
old-fashioned empirical and inductive research into real-world
economics.

June 2010

If I were to ask you where the money in your savings deposit
account is, you might say at the bank. That is not quite right.
In truth, your money is in several places simultaneously. In
this sense, finance is like quantum mechanics. Money is like
Schrodinger’s cat — you never know where it is until
you actually observe it. (And if everyone tries to observe
their money at the same time, that’s called a bank run.)

May 2010

The switching allegiance of tribes in Anbar province and in some
other provinces away from Al Qaeda and at least temporarily
arriving at deals of convenience with the Americans and fighting
alongside the Americans, and this includes people who have
killed American troops. That’s a significant change. It
actually is what you need in almost every counter insurgency, is
that kind of deal. That’s how you put down the insurgency.
There are real questions though about how sustainable that trend
is. And also whether it might end up simply adding fuel to the
fire of the future full blown civil war. The Shiite politicians
are profoundly worried about this that we are cutting deals with
their enemies. One Shiite politician recently said, Baby
crocodiles are cute, but you can’t keep adult crocodiles
in your house. And they worry that these deals we are
cutting with insurgent groups and tribes is creating a whole
bunch of baby alligators out there, that are going to grow up
and start biting each other as the US draws down its presence in
Iraq.

April 2010

[Republican] language implies that the current generation
borrows and future generations pay. But borrowing creates
assets as well as liabilities — and future generations
will inherit both. It’s the relationship between assets
and liabilities that matters most.

… [G]enerational accounting typically ignores the value of
the government services children will receive as well as the
important nonmarket assets they will inherit. The
president’s proposed budget features investments in
health, education and environmental sustainability that promise
important future benefits.

Think of the United States economy as a family farm in need of
modernization. Energy prices are going up, but all the tractors
are gas guzzlers. Some of our fields have accumulated toxic
levels of pesticide, and we need to develop new and better
technologies of sustainable production. Our grandchildren want
to run the farm, but will need good health and a college
education to do it well.

Spending money on increased energy efficiency, research and
development, health, and education could increase the value of
their assets, helping them repay debt.

March 2010

The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in, and money began
to play an important part in determining elections. Later on,
this process of corruption spread to the law courts and then to
the army. And finally, the Republic was subjected to the rule
of emperors.

Plutarch, The Roman Republic

February 2010

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace —
business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking,
class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States
as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that
Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government
by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these
forces been so united against one candidate as they stand
today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I
welcome their hatred.

January 2010

The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as
it exists today are the great tragedians of ancient
Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision
of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic
incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision
possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes
the order of nature in modern thought. …

… [Let me remind you that] the essense of
dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in
the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
The inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated
in terms of human life by incidents which in fact
involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the
futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.
This remorseless inevitableness is what prevades
scientific thought. The laws of physics are the
decrees of fate.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

December 2009

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that
accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure
onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the
illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be
blamed for one’s own inferiority/failure.
Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself,
but rather by an external evil. This issuing
of blame leads one to desire revenge, or at
least believe in the possibility of revenge; this lust
for revenge may take many forms, as in the Christian
conception of the Last Judgment, or the socialist
conception of revolution. In each case, a sense of
powerlessness creates the illusion of an enemy; one
suddenly conceives oneself to be oppressed rather than
merely weak, a phenomenon that spawns
externally-directed bitterness (lust for a perceived
revenge).

Nietzsche

November 2009

In the standard interpretations, Keynes has been
integrated with classical theory … to form what
is called the neoclassical synthesis. Whereas Keynes
in The General Theory proposed that
economists look at the economy in quite a different
way from the way they had, only those parts of
The General Theory that could be readily
integrated into the old way of looking at things
survive in today’s standard theory. What was
lost was a view of an economy always in transit
because it accumulates in response to disequilibrating
forces that are internal to the economy. As
a result of the way accumulation takes place in a
capitalist economy, Keynes’s 1935 theory showed
that success in operating the economy can only be
transitory; instability is an inherent and
inescapable flaw of capitalism.

The view that survived is that a number of special
things went wrong, which led the economy into the
Great Depression. In this view, apt policy can assure
that it cannot happen again. The standard theory of
the 1950s and 1960s seemed to assert that if policy
were apt, then full employment at stable prices could
be attained and sustained. The existence of
internally disruptive forces was ignored; the
neoclassical synthesis became the economics of
capitalism without capitalists, capital assets, and
financial markets. As a result, very little of
Keynes has survived today in standard economics.

Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an unstable economy

October 2009

But if the ideas are correct — an hypothesis on
which the author himself must necessarily base what he
writes — it would be a mistake, I predict, to
dispute their potency over a period of time. At the
present moment people are unusually expectant of a
more fundamental diagnosis; more particularly ready to
receive it; eager to try it out, if it should be even
plausible. But apart from this contemporary mood, the
ideas of economists and political philosophers, both
when they are right and when they are wrong, are more
powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the
world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who
believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of
some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear
voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from
some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am
sure that the power of vested interests is vastly
exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of
ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain
interval; for in the field of economic and political
philosophy there are not many who are influenced by
new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty
years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants
and politicians and even agitators apply to current
events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or
late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are
dangerous for good or evil.

September 2009

… professional investment may be likened to
those newspaper competitions in which the competitors
have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a
hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the
competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the
average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so
that each competitor has to pick, not those faces
which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he
thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of other
competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem
from the same point of view. It is not a case
choosing those, which to the best of one’s
judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those
which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest.
We have reached the third degree where we devote our
intelligences to anticipating what average opinion
expects the average opinion to be. And there are
some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth, and
higher degrees.

… Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady
stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when
enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of
speculation. When the capital development of a country
becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino,
the job is likely to be ill-done. …

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

August 2009

Up to now, Democrats have been acting like sheep being
herded by the Republican minority. They need to show
courage and stand up for what they believe.
That’s what the voters are waiting for.

July 2009

All are prisoners at Guantánamo today. As we
approach Boumediene’s anniversary, many
prisoners have won their habeas cases,
but few have been released. The Judicial Branch may
hold hearings; it may even issue vague and
unenforceable exhortations to diplomacy. But that is
all. It has become the hortatory branch.

Something has gone awry.

In habeas the Judicial Branch exerts a real
check over the Executive Branch. The decision below
held, and the Executive now argues that, by locating
its prison offshore, the Executive deprived the
judiciary of any check at all, and that a prisoner
within the court’s jurisdiction and unlawfully
held by the Executive may be released only by
diplomatic order of the Executive.

This argument misreads the judicial function, of which
cheerleading for diplomacy forms no part. Petitioners
know of no previous habeas decision insulating from
judicial remedy the indefinite and unlawful executive
imprisonment of a prisoner within the court’s
jurisdiction. To the contrary, the Great Writ was
mortared into the Constitution as a constraint upon
the power of the political branches.
Boumediene, 128 S. Ct. at 2259 (habeas
corpus was designed to restrain the
political branches and is an indispensable
mechanism for monitoring the separation of
powers). At issue now is whether that constraint
may unilaterally be dislodged by the Executive.

Thus the Executive’s assurances that diplomatic
efforts continue are like assurances that efforts to
cure the common cold continue. No one doubts them.
But the imprisonment continues too, and that is what
matters in habeas.

But it is the Third Branch, confined by the decision
below to exhortations, whose historic role most
urgently needs this Court’s review. The
significance of Boumediene—of which both
the majority and the dissenting Justices were well
aware—lies in its reaffirmation that the
historic role of the Judicial Branch is to demand the
release of prisoners precisely when the political
branches find release inconvenient. For this reason
the decision was welcomed at home and abroad as a
vindication of the Great Writ. Yet the decision below
holds, and the Executive now argues, that the
prisoners’ position on the day the Court
announced its decision was no different than it had
been for six years before. They would remain jailed
until the Executive chose to release them. This Court
might wonder today why every Justice thought so much
was at stake in Boumediene.

At bottom, the decision below posits a hollow writ and
a hobbled judiciary. Should this petition for
certiorari fail, the federal courts will have
sanctioned, within their jurisdiction, unlawful
executive imprisonment that may yet extend the
indefinite to the infinite.

June 2009

Much has been written about panics and manias, much
more than with the most outstretched intellect we are
able to follow or conceive; but one thing is certain,
that at particular times a great deal of stupid people
have a great deal of stupid money…. At
intervals, from causes which are not to the present
purpose, the money of these people—the blind
capital, as we call it, of the country—is
particularly large and craving; it seeks for someone
to devour it, there is a plethora; it finds
someone, and there is speculation; it is
devoured, and there is panic.

Walter Bagehot, Essays on Edward Gibbon

May 2009

As with all analogies, the comparisons are never
exact. Nevertheless, they illustrate the scale of the
economic whirlwind of 1929-32—a crisis
equivalent in scope to the combined effects and more
of the 1994 Mexican peso crises, the 1997-98 Asian and
Russian crises, the 2000 collapse in the stock market
bubble, and the 2007/8 world financial crisis, all
cascading upon one and other in a single concentrated
two-year period. The world has been saved in part from
anything approaching the Great Depression because the
crises that have buffeted the world economy over the
past decade have conveniently struck one by one, with
decent intervals in between.

Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance

April 2009

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am),
reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s
wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh
(especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping
feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or
will not, see. By definition, establishments believe
in propping up the existing order. Members of the
ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things
pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status
quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be
healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But
sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of
cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice
cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by
self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in
Lords of Finance, his new book about the
folly of central bankers before the Great Depression,
and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War
classic, The Best and the Brightest.
Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial
system or the devotion of Obama’s team to
preserving it. But what if he’s right, or part
right? What if President Obama is squandering his only
chance to step in and nationalize—well, maybe
not nationalize, that loaded word—but
restructure the banks before they collapse altogether?

March 2009

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning
government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of
practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously
contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other
descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human
passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed
them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed
to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their
common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall
into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion
presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions
have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and
excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and
durable source of factions has been the various and unequal
distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are
without property have ever formed distinct interests in
society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors,
fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a
manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed
interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in
civilized nations, and divide them into different classes,
actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of
these various and interfering interests forms the principal task
of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and
faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the
government.

February 2009

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views
beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is
doing God’s service when it is violating all His
laws.

John Adams, letter to Jefferson, 1816

December 2008, January 2009

We’re standing at the precipice of hell. The Western model
of growth is inherently toxic. It’s highly capital
intensive, and highly resource intensive, uses a lot of a
materials, uses a lot of energy, and generates a lot of
waste. If every Indian wants to live like an American, then
the planet is doomed.

November 2008

Every thing that’s happened wrong in energy in the United
States has happened because there was a group of voters that
put their own parochial needs ahead of our nation. West
Virgina coal miners, Michigan auto workers, farmers from
Iowa: none of these groups have thought about our nation.
They’re thinking about their small local community. We have
to think as a nation. We need a leader who is going to
stand up and say, we need to do this together. And it’s
doable.

October 2008

TIME WAS, we thought that a conclusive demonstration that the
emperor had no clothes would be sufficient to overturn his
reign. No leader could take power without media support; no
ruler could keep his throne without the cooperation of the
press. But the consolidation of media in recent years — a
series of intermarriages consecrated by the FCC — has
created a panic among tube-feeding activists like
myself. Increasingly, the opportunity to define the "truth" has
been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. What’s more, the new
Media Hyperbarons are corporations of such colossal wealth and
power that they are guaranteed to support the status quo that
gave rise to them.

August-September 2008

We are left to shout abuse, to hurl ourselves against
the lines of police, to seek to smash the fences which
stand between us and the decisions being made on our
behalf. When — they emerge, clothed in the
serenity of power, to announce that it is done, our
howls of execration serve only to enhance the
graciousness of their detachment. They are the
actors, we the audience, and for all our catcalls and
imprecations, we can no more change the script to
which they play than the patrons of a cinema can
change the course of the film they watch.

George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, p. 84

June-August 2008

Any group of people that perceives itself as a distinct group,
and which is so perceived by the outside world, may be called a
tribe. The group might be a race, as ordinarily defined, but it
need not be; it can just as well be a religious sect, a
political group, or an occupational group. The essential
characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double
standard of morality—one kind of behavior of in-group
relations, another for out-group.

It is one of the unfortunate and inescapable characteristics of
tribalism that it eventually evokes counter-tribalism (or, to
use a different figure of speech, it polarizes society).

Garrett Hardin, Journal of Urban Law, April 1971

May 2008

The fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages,
salaries or from investments is beyond question. In
the first case, the income is uncertain and limited
in duration; sickness or death destroys it and old
age diminishes it; in the other, the source of
income continues; the income may be disposed of
during a mans life and it descends to his
heirs. Surely we can afford to make a distinction
between the people whose only capital is their
mettle and physical energy and the people whose
income is derived from investments. Such a
distinction would mean much to millions of American
workers and would be an added inspiration to the man
who must provide a competence during his few
productive years to care for himself and his family
when his earnings capacity is at an end.

Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business, 1924

April 2008

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain
attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the
dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and
bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of
being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of
dreams. …

March 2008

Shall I then rank with gods? Too well I feel
My kinship with the worm, who bores the soil,
Who feeds on dust until the wanderer’s heel
Gives sepulture to all his care and toil.

Is it not dust, that fills my hundred shelves,
And walls me in like any pedant hack?
Fellow of moth that flits and worm that delves,
I drag my life through bric-a-brac.
And shall I discover what I lack,
And learn, by reading countless volumes through,
That mortals mostly live on misery’s rack,
That happiness is known to just a few?
You hollow skull, what has your grin to say,
But that a mortal brain, with trouble tossed,
Sought once, like mine, the sweetness of the day,
And strove for truth, and in the gloam was lost.
You instruments, you mock me to my face,
With wheel and gimbal, cylinder and cog;
You were my key to unlock the secret place:
The wards are cunning, but the levers clog.
For Nature keeps her veil inviolate,
Mysterious still in open light of day,
And where the spirit cannot penetrate
Your screws and irons will never make a way.
Here stands the gear that I have never touched,
My father’s stuff, bequeathed to be my prison,
With scrolls of vellum, blackened and besmutched,
Where still the desk-lamp’s dismal smoke has risen.
Better have spent what little was my own,
Than sweat for petty gains by midnight oil.
The things that man inherit come alone
To true possession by the spirit’s toil.
What can’t be used is trash; what can, a prize
Begotten from the moment as it flies.

Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, translated by Philip Wayne

February 2008

Ordinary Americans have been manipulated into
imagining they are a people under siege whose sole
refuge and protector is their government. If it
isn’t the Communists, it’s al-Qaeda. If
it isn’t Cuba, it’s Nicaragua. As a
result, this, the most powerful nation in the world
— with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its
history of having waged and sponsored endless wars,
and the only nation in history to have actually used
nuclear bombs — is peopled by a terrified
citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the
state not by social services, or public health care,
or employment guarantees, but by fear.

Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire, San Francisco, 16 August 2004, ZNet transcriptCD

January 2008

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it
exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as
possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation.
Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by
imposing a false standard of what is and what is not
desirable.

October, November, December 2007

That Schwartz’s result is heralded as the death-knell
of global warming by denialist blogs and Sen. Inhofe,
even before it has been officially published (let
alone before the scientific community has responded)
says more about the denialist movement than about the
sensitivity of earth’s climate system. But, that’s how
politics works.

September 2007

Everything has been globalized except our consent. Democracy
alone has been confined to the nation state. It stands at the
national border, suitcase in hand, without a passport.

George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, p. 1

August 2007

Publicity is usually explained and justified as a
competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the
consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers — and thus
the national economy. It is closely related to certain
ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser:
freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great
hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of
capitalism are the immediate visible sign of The Free
World. For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West
sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is
thought, offers a free choice.

It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one
firm, competes with another; but it is also true that every
publicity image confirms and enhances every other.
Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages:
it is a language in itself which is always being used to
make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices
are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and
this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single
proposal.

…

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing
us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a
result, enviable. The state of being envied is what
constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of
manufacturing glamour.

It is important here not to confuse publicity with the
pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it
advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it
feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths,
sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves.
Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for
pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure
and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that
pleasure’s own terms. The more convincingly publicity
conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the
more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is
hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the
chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why
publicity can never really afford to be about the product or
opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet
enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a
pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future
buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by
the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image
then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what
makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of
other. Publicity is about social relations, not objects.
Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness
as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of
being envied is glamour.

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends
precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who
envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not
observe with interest — if you do, you will become less
enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats;
the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for
themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the
glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of
the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this which
explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour
images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain
them.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will
become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine
herself transformed by the product into an object of envy
for others, an envy which will then justify her loving
herself. One could put this another way: the publicity
image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it
back to her for the price of the product.

July 2007

Society must cease to look upon progress as
something desirable. Eternal progress is a
nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a
steadily expanding economy, but a zero-growth
economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not
only unnecessary but ruinous. We must set ourselves
the aim not of increasing national resources, but
merely of conserving them.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

June 2007

Love just doesn’t sit there, like a stone, it has to be made,
like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Princess

May 2007

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if
he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he
has a just demand, and if the society do not want his
labour, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be
where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is
no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone,
and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does
not work upon the compassion of some of her guests.
If these guests get up and make room for him, other
intruders immediately appear demanding the same
favour. The report of a provision for all that come,
fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and
harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that
before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the
happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle
of misery and dependence in every part of the hall,
and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are
justly enraged at not finding the provision which they
had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late
their error, in counter-acting those strict orders to
all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the
feast, who, wishing that all guests should have
plenty, and knowing she could not provide for
unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh
comers when her table was already full.

Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population,
2nd ed. London J. Johnson, 1803. (Book IV, Chap. VI,
p. 531.)
as quoted at The Feast of Malthus, by Garrett Hardin

April 2007

After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in
the way it has done, with such overwhelming military
force, can the resistance be expected to be a
conventional military one? (Of course, even if it were
conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In
a strange sense, the U.S. government’s arsenal of
weapons and unrivaled air and fire power makes
terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What people
lack in wealth and power, they will make up with
stealth and strategy.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do
not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance,
then by default they privilege those who turn to
violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is
credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change
by to nonviolent dissent.

But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being
crushed. Any kind of mass political mobilization or
organization is being bought off, or broken, or simply
ignored. Meanwhile, governments and the corporate
media, and let’s not forget the film industry, lavish
their time, attention, technology, research, and
admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been
deified. The message this sends is disturbing and
dangerous: If you seek to air a public grievance,
violence is more effective than nonviolence.

…

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the
bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals look
down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly.
There’s no Alternative, they say. And let slip
the dogs of war. And then from the ruins of
Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya,
from the streets of occupied Palestine, and the
mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of
Columbia, and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam,
comes the chilling reply: There’s no alternative
but terrorism. Terrorism, armed struggle,
insurgency, call it what you want. Terrorism is
viscous, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators,
as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say
that terrorism is the privatization of war.
Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They are
people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly
on the legitimate use of violence. Human society is
journeying to a terrible place. But of course there’s
an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice.
And it’s time to recognize that no amount of nuclear
weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or daisy cutters,
or spurious governing councils and loya jirgas can buy
peace at the cost of justice. The urge for
hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched
with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and
justice by others. Exactly what form that battle
takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends
on us.

Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire, San Francisco, 16 August 2004: ZNet transcriptCD

March 2007

Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished
convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so
doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been
accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when
doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every
manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that
most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments
for going on believing as we already do.

February 2007

Is this prudent? What would we say if a man jumped off the
World Trade Building with a bag of hardware in the hope that he
would figure out a way to build a parachute on the way down?

Garrett Hardin, Is Civilization Ready for Nuclear Power?, 1976

January 2007

I have respect for Representative Murtha, former marine colonel.
The guy’s alright. Except when did the war become bad,
Jack? … You were for the war Jack. … You voted for
it; you funded it. But then you saw the bodies. What’s
the number that’s good for you Jack? Was this war worth
fifty? Was this worth a hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?
… When did this war become bad, Jack? This war became bad
the day we invaded and until you say that, until you say we
should never have invaded, that Saddam Hussein was not a threat,
you’re telling me you’re not against the war,
you’re against losing Jack. And that’s what most
Americans who are against this war today are. They’re
against losing. If it all had gone well. If we went in there
and Democracy flourished, and all this stuff, casualties were
low, it wouldn’t matter one iota to the majority of
Americans that we were lied to about this war, that we violated
international law going to war, and that’s the problem.
Until we care about the law, until we care about the process,
we’re going to go to war with Iran, because this
isn’t about being anti-war or having some wonderful moral
awakening, this is about the fact that we’re getting out
butts kicked in Iraq, and you know what’s bad when the
bully starts getting his butt kicked, he’s looking around
for someone else to kick. And right now we’re desperately
looking for someone else on the block to kick. And we’ve
got our sights set on Iran.

December 2006

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it moves inexorably
towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away
economic and political systems, ethical considerations and
social structures. No human agency can halt its progress
— nothing, but another metaphysical mutation.

Michel Houellebecq, Atomised

November 2006

We have handed a blank check drawn against our own freedom to a
man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this
country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever
done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man
who has insisted again that the United States does not
torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our
values and who has said it with a straight face while the
pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding
figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our own freedom to a
man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any
non-American citizens Unlawful Enemy Combatants and ship
them somewhere – anywhere – but may now, if he so
decides, declare you an Unlawful Enemy Combatantand ship
you somewhere – anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper
editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when
Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when
Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended
for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself
this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call
you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an unlawful
enemy combatant exactly how are you going to convince them
to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think
this Attorney General is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he
intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

These military commissions will provide a fair trial, you
told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. In which the accused are
presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all
the evidence against them.

Presumed innocent, Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for
the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they
sustain serious mental and physical trauma in the hope of
getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even
invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

Access to an attorney, Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir,
and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his
detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead
guilty.

Hearing all the evidence, Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions act specifically permits the
introduction of classified evidence not made available to the
defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies, that imperil us all.

One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11
attacks, you told us yesterday, said he hoped the attacks
would be the beginning of the end of America.

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of
terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have
wrought.

Habeas Corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal
beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection?
Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be the
beginning of the end of America.

October 2006

This is why, though both sides would furiously deny it, the
outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied
universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the
oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors, but
by eliminating the state (as some, but by no means all the
market fundamentalists wish to do), both simply remove such
restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This,
of course, is the point of market fundamentalism. But it is
also the inevitable result of anarchism. — For the
majority of humankind to be free, we must restrain the freedom
of those who would oppress us.

George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, p. 38

September 2006

If global warming were a terrorist, then perhaps Newt Gingrich
would say that our battle against it is World War III. He would
note that people are being killed by record heat around the
world. That includes 53 deaths here in the United States so far
this summer, and many more across Europe. In France, 40 people
have been killed. In the Netherlands, they’ve had the hottest
July ever recorded, and they started recording the temperatures
there three hundred years ago.

If global warming were a terrorist, George W. Bush would call it
evil and say it has changed everything. Bush would make
speeches observing that the attacks of climate change are
relentless. Unlike the rare attacks by Al Quaida, attacks by
the global warming terrorists are frequent and consistent, year
after year. Last year, there was the Hurricane Katrina
terrorist cell. This year, in addition to all the people dying
of the record heat, there has been an astounding increase in
wildfires burning across America. If global warming were a
terrorist, we’d call those fires arson, and describe them as an
attack on the heartland.

July 2006

June 2006

The state, like a tree, is essentially immobile. While it can
expand its access to resources by extending its roots into
the soil on which other trees are growing, it must adapt to the
circumstances in which it finds itself. The corporations, like
omnivorous animals, are mobile. They move from tree to tree,
taking shelter in the branches, preying upon both the trees
which protect them, and the other members of the ecosystem,
seeking always the most easily obtained resources. The burden
of predation has now become so great that most of the trees in
the wood appear to be suffering what foresters call
‘die-back’.

George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order

May 2006

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

April 2006

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember
always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends
upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear,
one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of
unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and
remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from
men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend
causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, 9 March 1954

March 2006

February 2006

The dance of the puppets
The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournament’s begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king.

The keeper of the city keys
Put shutters on the dreams.
I wait outside the pilgrim’s door
With insufficient schemes.
The black queen chants
The funeral march,
The cracked brass bells will ring;
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king.

The gardener plants an evergreen
Whilst trampling on a flower.
I chase the wind of a prism ship
To taste the sweet and sour.
The pattern juggler lifts his hand;
The orchestra begin.
As slowly turns the grinding wheel
In the court of the crimson king.

On soft gray mornings widows cry
The wise men share a joke;
I run to grasp divining signs
To satisfy the hoax.
The yellow jester does not play
But gentle pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king.

King Crimson, The Court of The Crimson King

January 2006

We can tolerate neither our vices nor their remedies.

Titus Livius (Livy), Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City)

December 2005

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of
confusion—a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for
bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or
even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up
cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and
fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

Around us all, now high like a distant thunderhead, now close
upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog, there is
an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kid
that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the
ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs, to
try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the
fury of the A-bombs or the hell-bombs, or whatever may be
coming.

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the
images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn
down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt
of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things
we had long since taken for granted to be durable and
unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to
distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

November 2005

All civilized societies would be divided into different sects,
factions, and interests, as they happened to consist of rich and
poor, debtors and creditors, the landed, the manufacturing, the
commercial interests, the inhabitants of this district or that
district, the followers of this political leader or that
political leader, the disciples of this religious sect or that
religious sect. In all cases where a majority are united by a
common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in
danger. What motives are to restrain them?

James Madison, Journal of the Federal Convention, 1787

October 2005

If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it’s in a sorry
state. … Republicans don’t even pretend anymore.

September 2005

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the
radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one
thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the
quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the
truth.

This is the point of my story. Ideologues don’t want you to go
beyond the typical labels of left and right because people may
start believing you. They embrace a world view that cannot be
proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the
contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief
system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

August 2005

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at
NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway
journalism. Those rules divide the world into democrats and
republicans, liberals and conservatives and allow journalists to
pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the
truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity
to spin the news.
…
I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and
everything else is publicity.
…
Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a
people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm
their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit
by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a
fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy
can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us,
too.

July 2005

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most
people are never going to die because they are never going to be
born. The potential people who could have been standing in my
place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand
grains of Sahara more, the atoms in the universe. Certainly
those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Donne, greater
scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. We
know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA
so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth
of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to
be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to
wonder why.

June 2005

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that
the glory—the lofty goals announced beforehand, the
victories, the liberation of the oppressed—belongs to the
country as a whole; but the failure—the accidents, the
uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities—is
always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble
people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of
individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the
national conscience.

This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and
political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting
American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These
photographs do not capture the soul of America, they argued.
They are aberrant.

This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their
authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants
censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in
ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits
of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war—only the
good is our doing—becomes self-propagating. …

Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems,
isn’t so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will
get to the bottom of that and, of course, we’re not really
like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers’
reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist,
are not us.

But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals
(though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do,
and the military’s own internal report calls the abuse
systemic). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are
made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the
acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are
held directly accountable for these crimes, we are,
collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done.
We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead
civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.

And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into
the culture of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand
back. Look at the history. Open up to the hard facts of human
nature, the lessons of the past, the warning signs of future
abuses.

These photos show us what we may become, as occupation
continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral.
There’s nothing surprising in this. These pictures are
pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people,
the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the
vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they
could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the
French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the
people of the Congo. …

Not quite 50 years ago, Aime Cesaire, a poet and writer from
Martinique, wrote in his Discourse on Colonialism:
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the
colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to
degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness,
violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.

Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say
our leaders.

May 2005

…The motivation of the revolutionary power may well be
defensive; it may well be sincere in its protestations of
feeling threatened. But the distinguishing feature of a
revolutionary power is not that it feels threatened—such
feeling is inherent in the nature of international relations
based on sovereign states—but that nothing can
reassure it. Only absolute security—the
neutralization of the opponent—is considered a sufficient
guarantee, and thus the desire of one power for absolute
security means absolute insecurity for all the others.

Diplomacy, the art of restraining the exercise of power, cannot
function in such an environment. It is a mistake to assume that
diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is
good faith and willingness to come to an
agreement. For in a revolutionary international order, each
power will seem to its opponent to lack precisely these
qualities. Diplomats can still meet but they cannot persuade,
for they have ceased to speak the same language.…

For powers long accustomed to tranquillity and without
experience with disaster, this is a hard lesson to come by.
Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they
find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of
the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing
framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to
begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its
protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the
existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining
purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be
assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the
danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel
adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane, for
they have all the good reasons on their side: the
arguments accepted as valid in the existing framework.…

But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses
the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed
eager, to push its principles to their ultimate
conclusion. … Principles in a revolutionary situation are
so central that they are constantly talked about. The very
sterility of the effort soon drains them of all meaning, and it
is not unusual to find both sides invoking their version of the
true nature of legitimacy in identical terms.…

April 2005

Nothing works more in a thief’s favor than people feeling
secure. That’s why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded
can sometimes be the easiest targets. The single most important
factor in security — more than locks, alarms, sensors, or armed
guards — is attitude. A building protected by nothing more than
a cheap combination lock but inhabited by people who are alert
and risk-aware is much safer than one with the world’s most
sophisticated alarm system whose tenants assume they’re living
in an impregnable fortress.

March 2005

To children today, the war was something in the dusty past, as
ancient as Caesar. They wonder why their parents are forever
using the phrases before the war or after the war.
It is because war is a watershed in the life of a nation and a
person. Nothing is ever the same again. The last great war
crucified some American families and made others rich. It threw
up new leaders and broke the careers of some who pretended to be
leaders. It broke bodies and hearts and moral values. It
poisoned the meaning of existing words and kindled new words and
meanings. It invented new ways to kill a thousand people and to
cure fever in a child. It taught us that free men can build
anything, pay for anything, endure anything, if they have the
will to do so. The war that started 25 years ago began 25 years
after the first world war had begun, but the lesson was not
learned. It wasn’t learned because every generation starts life
afresh, without memory and because pain and death are not
multiplied in the human spirit. Because even 35 million deaths
leave an empty place at only one family table. This presumably
is what permits life to go on, and makes a next time always
possible.

February 2005

In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most
part on repetition, supression and rationalization — the
repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true,
the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the
arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the
interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of
manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the
future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the
non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to
drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential
to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of
democratic institutions.

January 2005

All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a
majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but
whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this
administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out
makes such acts likely.

The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric
spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent
days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Those in public office have let us know that they consider their
task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief
management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which
entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been
replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together.
But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical
awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and
what may continue to happen. Our country is strong, we
are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely
consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not
all America has to be.

December 2004

On a lighter note, it is hard to avoid observing that al-Baghdadi
castigated Bush’s administration as fundamentalist and
right-wing. When even the Sunni Salafis of Mosul consider you
too fundamentalist and right-wing, you have probably gone too
far.

October 2004

We had a rather long period of time, between 1945 and 2000, in
which the United States … viewed our role as more like
that of the sheriff in a western town of the frontier, instead
of being like Jesse James. That’s a very important distinction,
because the sheriff, while he’s there to produce law and order,
is accountable to the community. The United States, while we
were the great power, viewed ourselves as being accountable to
the world community. And on the basis of that accountability,
when this President took office, with the exception of Jordan
and Pakistan, in every major country in which public opinion
polling existed, between sixty and eight-five percent of the
public trusted the United States more or less to do the right
thing in international affairs. And after only four years, in
eighty percent of the countries where there is such opinion
polling, a majority of the public no longer trusts the United
States to do the right thing. The average support for American
foreign policy in most of the world is running between twenty
five and thirty percent, whereas four years ago it was running
between seventy five and eighty percent.

The only unequivocally good policy option before the American
people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who
had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot
steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.

In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and
women not yet overcome by the war madness to raise their voice of
protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and
outrage which are about to be perpetrated upon them.

Emma Goldman

If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get
nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone’s quite
registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He
seems to understand—indeed, to count on—the media’s
unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness,
laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate
of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove’s skill but
his character that allows him to perform on an entirely
different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has
both an understanding of the media’s unstated self-limitations
and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids
most others.

September 2004

Note: The Republican National Convention occurred in September.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only
power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even
those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The
German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in
their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their
own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that
they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and
that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human
beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know
that no one ever seizes power with the intention of
relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does
not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power.

August 2004

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be
untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently
twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an
indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a
false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a
battlefield.

July 2004

It was discovered that the freedom in this land is not ours. It
is the freedom of the occupying soldiers in doing what they
like, such as arresting, carrying out raids, killing at random
or stealing money.

No one can ask them what they are doing, because they are
protected by their freedom. No one can punish them, whether in
our country or their country. The worst thing is what was
discovered in the course of time: abusing women, children, men,
and the old men and women whom they arrested randomly and
without any guilt. They expressed the freedom of rape, the
freedom of nudity and the freedom of humiliation.

Sheik Mohammed Bashir, in his sermon Friday at Um
al-Oura, a Sunni Muslim mosque in the middle-class Ghazaliya
neighborhood, as quoted at
Informed Comment

June 2004

Today, most US officials and commentators, while condemning the
abuses revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison, speak in terms of
finding ways to fix the system so these abuses will not happen
again.

The need is deeper. We need to understand that if we choose the
option of war, abuses will inevitably follow. It is the very
nature of war. Indeed, war itself is abuse.

May 2004

And 1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The
lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover,
it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the
defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of
noncombatants in the name of peace was only a corollary
of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources
for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures
of the Earth in the name of man. The victory of the ethic
of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it
was disastrous.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Word for
World Is Forest, 1976

April 2004

This isn’t America; the government did not invent
intelligence material nor exaggerate the description of the
threat to justify their attack on the Hamas leader the way
George Bush did on his way to Baghdad.

March 2003

February 2004

I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way
to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant
to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman
Empire. Certainly, when I preach in the United States I feel, as
I imagine the Apostle Paul did when he first passed through the
gates of Rome—admiration for its people, awe at its
manifest virtues and resentment of its careless power.

America’s preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than
those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid or by
Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you
have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue
myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect
between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American
people and the ruthless way American power is experienced,
directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to
help good people see how they have let their institutions do
their sinning for them.

This is not easy among people who really believe that their
country does nothing but good. But it is necessary, not only for
their future, but for us all. All around the world there are
those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people,
who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your
human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate
way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.

Bishop Peter Storey, South Africa

January 2004

Alas, where shall I climb now with my longing? From all
mountains I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But home
I found nowhere; a fugitive am I in all cities and a departure
at all gates. Strange and a mockery to me are the men of today
to whom my heart recently drew me; and I am driven out of
fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my
children’s land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea:
for this I bid my sails search and search.

Friedrich Nietzche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

December 2003

Trying to eliminate Saddam … would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was
probably impossible…. We would have been forced to occupy
Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq … there was no viable
“exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our
principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to
set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world.
Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the
United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of
international response to aggression that we hoped to establish.
Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could
conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile
land.

November 2003

Over the last two years, the President has shown us his take on
a new era in environmental protection. The Bush formula: slap
some squeaky-clean sounding names on a bunch of
industry-friendly policies, resulting in some proposals that
equal a polluter’s paradise and an industrial free-for-all on
our public lands.

October 2003

Certainty about the world does not make the world more certain.
The easiest road to moral clarity is a refusal to learn from
complex events. For a few horrible hours two Septembers ago,
nobody could claim to know anything. That uncertainty, at
least, haunts us still. Or should.

September 2003

August 2003

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.

George Orwell

July 2003

and i’ll tell you what, while we’re at it
you can keep the pentagon
keep the propaganda
keep each and every tv
that’s been trying to convince me
to participate
in some prep school punk’s plan to perpetuate retribution
perpetuate retribution
even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution
is still hanging in the air
and there’s ash on our shoes
and there’s ash in our hair
and there’s a fine silt on every mantle
from hell’s kitchen to brooklyn

June 2003

May 2003

I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda
in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best
training in the world — in the field of advertizing
— and have mastered the techniques with exceptional
proficiency … Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are
crude and obvious … I think that the fundamental
difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is
quite simple. You tend to believe yours … and we tend to
disbelieve ours.

April 2003

Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation
that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those
conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them,
and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will
by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank
God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception.

February 2003

All power is power over someone, and it always somehow
responds, usually unwittingly rather than deliberately, to
the state of mind and the behavior of those it rules over.

Václav Havel

January 2003

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and
people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its
protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all
circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences,
was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions
can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.